162316 20251017144612.0 doi 10.1177/23409444251351328 sideral 144895 ART-2025-144895 eng Chopo-Murillo, Maria Sonia (orcid)0000-0002-1255-0734 Performance and Corporate Diversification: Evidence From the Insurance Industry 2025 Access copy available to the general public Unrestricted This article investigates whether corporate diversification may be driven by poor performance. We analyze Spanish non-life insurers’ diversification status and extent over a 13-year sample period. Performance is measured through cost/revenue inefficiency, adjusted for scale inefficiency. The results do not reject the hypothesis that poor cost and revenue performance motivates diversification (both status and total extent), suggesting that firms pursue it to better exploit diversification economies. However, inefficiency does not seem to explain the extent of unrelated diversification, indicating that such economies may arise under both related and unrelated strategies. In addition, our results appear to support the benefits of internal capital markets as a motive for diversification, since opaque insurers tend to exhibit higher levels of total diversification than transparent ones. Furthermore, non-life insurers seem to diversify into unrelated lines to circumvent barriers to growth in the product markets in which they operate. info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2021-127736NB-I00 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess by-nc https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.es info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion Rubio-Misas, María Salas-Fumás, Vicente Universidad de Zaragoza (orcid)0000-0001-8405-1056 4012 650 Universidad de Zaragoza Dpto. Direcc.Organiza.Empresas Área Organización de Empresas (2025), [20 pp.] Bus. res. q. BRQ Business Research Quarterly 2340-9436 465407 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/162316/files/texto_completo.pdf Versión publicada 2309039 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/162316/files/texto_completo.jpg?subformat=icon icon Versión publicada oai:zaguan.unizar.es:162316 articulos driver 2025-10-17-14:17:57 ARTICLE